Limbic thought and artificial intelligence

It will be eons before AI thinks with a limbic brain, let alone has consciousness

AI programmes themselves generate additional computer programming code to fine-tune their algorithms—without the need for an army of computer programmers. In AI speak, this is now often referred to as “machine learning”.

An AI programme “catastrophically forgets” the learnings from its first set of data and would have to be retrained from scratch with new data. The website futurism.com says a completely new set of algorithms would have to be written for a programme that has mastered face recognition, if it is now also expected to recognize emotions. Data on emotions would have to be manually relabelled and then fed into this completely different algorithm for the altered programme to have any use. The original facial recognition programme would have “catastrophically forgotten” the things it learnt about facial recognition as it takes on new code for recognizing emotions. According to the website, this is because computer programmes cannot understand the underlying logic that they have been coded with.

Irina Higgins, a senior researcher at Google DeepMind, has recently announced that she and her team have begun to crack the code on “catastrophic forgetting”.

As far as I am concerned, this limbic thinking is “catastrophic thinking” which is the only true antipode to AI’s “catastrophic forgetting”. It will be eons before AI thinks with a limbic brain, let alone has consciousness.